I'm a theater lover. I am happiest when I am sitting in a theater. Or talking about theater. Or reading about theater. Or now blogging about it. If you’re reading this, you're probably a theater lover too and I hope you’ll keep me company as I blog my way through each Broadway season.

September 30, 2017

It's hard not to be charmed by Charm, the new play about a 67-year-old transgender woman who offers etiquette lessons to underprivileged and gender-fluid youths. For everyone associated with this MCC Theater production—playwright Philip
Dawkins, director Will Davis and the gender-diverse cast led by Sandra
Caldwell—is earnestly committed to doing and saying the right thing. The
result is sentimental—but inspirational too.

The play itself, or at least its first act, was inspired by
the experiences of Miss Gloria Allen, a now 73-year-old transgender woman who has lived her true identity since she was 19, mentored homeless youths
at Chicago's LGBTQ center and been described as a blend of RuPaul and Auntie Mame (click here to read more about her and the show's genesis).

But, as though he were one of her students, Dawkins takes a
decorous approach to Allen's story that not only beatifies his subject but
makes her fictional stand-in Mama Darleena Andrews less colorful than the real
woman seems to be.

And while the students in the play's class are a span-the-gamut mix of
rainbow ethnicities, identities ranging from the gender proud to the
gender confused and social backgrounds that include a rich kid seeking a safe
place to figure out who he is and a homeless teen who supports herself by
working the streets as a prostitute, there's a polite quality to all of them too.

They're all looking for love and affirmation and Dawkins gives each of them the chance to
act out a bit. But they too
easily buy into Mama Darleena's anachronistic ideas about the right way to eat,
sit and conform to conventional rules about the way men and women (transgender
or cisgender) should behave.

In fact, the play's best conflict is between Mama and D, the
gender-non-conforming director of the center who has a more contemporary view
on what it means to be a trans person.

That should be drama enough but in the second act, Dawkins
mixes in jealousies and rivalries that eventually threaten the future of the
etiquette program and Mama Dareleena's very life. Then he quickly whirls through resolutions to these problems as though they were plot points on a TV
procedural.

Yet, it's still great to see a story about transgender
people that isn't unrelentingly depressing or sad but is instead upbeat and
celebratory. That's due, in part to the substantial transgender presence on the
creative team, starting with Davis, the artistic director of Chicago's American
Theatre Company and the first acknowledged transgender person to lead a mainstream
theatre company in this country (click here to read more about him).

Davis actively recruited transgender actors to be a part of
his cast. Their abilities vary but, under Davis' steady hand, they all bring authenticity and obvious delight to the roles they play. And the production really lucked out with Caldwell, a longtime actress who was moved to come out as
transgender by the opportunity to be in this play (click here to read an interview with her).

Caldwell is warm and funny as she delivers the snappy lines
Dawkins has written for Mama Darleena but she also imbues the role with a gravitas hewn from her own
experiencces of what it has been like to live as a trans person in this
society.

Charm, which is running at the Lucille Lortel Theatre
through Oct. 15, isn't a great play but, particularly in these tolerance-testing times, it's one worth seeing and cheering on.

September 23, 2017

The instrument that gives The Violin its title is what the
film director Alfred Hitchcock used to call a MacGuffin, a plot device to
provide some momentum for what in this play, which opened at the 59E59 Theaters
this week, is really a character study of three lost souls.

They are Bobby, a twentysomething petty crook; Terry, his slow-witted
younger brother and Giovanni, a middle-aged tailor who has been a surrogate
father to the brothers since their parents were killed by local mobsters when
they were still boys and their Lower East Side neighborhood had yet to gentrify.

As the play opens, Terry has just quit his job as a cab
driver and brought home a violin case someone left in the backseat. Inside they
find an 18th century Stradivarius which Bobby believes can be ransomed for a
six-figure fee from its owner.

Gio, as the brothers call the tailor, initially
wants nothing to do with the extortion scheme but is gradually seduced into it.
I hope it's no spoiler to say that their plan goes awry.

But even the conspiracy is another MacGuffin. For what really
interests playwright Dan McCormick are the ways in which we define family and
the obligations we owe—and should be able to demand from—those we love.

These
are familiar themes and there's a thrown-back quality to director Joseph Discher's production too. In dress, mannerisms and dems-and-dese speech, all three men
would be right at home in an Elia Kazan-era melodrama. Even Gio's antiquated
tailor shop looks as though it's been left over from the Eisenhower
Administration.

And the dramaturgy—dependent on anguished soliloquies about
unrequited dreams and not-so-surprising revelations about the past—is a little
timeworn too.

But despite all this, my husband K and I had a good time. And
that's largely due to the committed performances from Peter Bradbury, Kevin
Isola and most especially Robert LuPone, the co-artistic director of MCC
Theatre who hasn't been onstage since 2001 (click here to read an interview with him) but seems happy to be back.They all chomp a bit on the scenery but it's fun to watch them do it.

September 16, 2017

Ever since a friend died earlier this summer at the
relatively young age of 62, I've been preoccupied with death. So For Peter Pan
on her 70th birthday, Sarah Ruhl's warm-hearted meditation on mortality which
opened at Playwrights Horizons this week, really hit my sweet spot, even if most critics are sour on the show (click here for those reviews).

Although the play runs just 90 minutes, it's a triptych
that moves from a deathbed, to the quotidian rituals of mourning to the reluctant acknowledgement that some day we too must die.

Ruhl has said that she wrote the play as a present for her
mother, an occasional actress whose favorite role was playing the character
Peter Pan, who famously never wants to grow old. (Click here to read more about its origins).

Ann, the central character in the play, is one of the five
siblings who sit vigil in a hospital room as their aged father dies. She's also
the odd duck in her Iowa-raised clan, an early widow who has raised a child on
her own and lost a little of her faith unlike her still-married and pious sister,
gotten a degree later in life than her doctor brothers and still cherishes the
memory of appearing as the title character in her high school production of
Peter Pan.

As Ann and her brothers and sister grieve their beloved
father, they hold a wake, complete with Irish whiskey, and retell old stories
about the past and share their thoughts about what death and the afterlife may bring, from the nihilism of nothingness to the comforting spiritualism of
ever-present ghosts, to the whimsy of a Neverland where life and youth are
eternal.

Director Les Waters has assembled a top-notch cast to spin this tale. David Chandler, Lisa Emery, Daniel Jenkins and Keith Reddin are lovely as Ann's siblings whose lives have taken them to different parts of the country
and down disparate philosophical paths but whose love for one another binds them
together. Ron Crawford is particularly affecting as their dad.

But this production had me from the moment I learned that Ann
would be played by Kathleen Chalfant, an actor who seems incapable of giving
less than a brilliant performance. Here she soars again, and in more ways
than one as she grounds the character in a determined optimism and literally
takes to the air as Ann assumes her Peter Pan personae.

As my theatergoing buddy Bill and I left the theater, I overhead
some audience members grumbling that the show, particularly the wake part, had been too slow. But it seemed just right to me, calling to mind the times that sitting with other mourners and sharing old stories had brought comfort when I lost someone.

I hate audience participation but when, evoking a moment in J.M. Barrie's original play, we were asked to clap so that Peter could live, I slapped my hands together as hard as I could.

This is the second Playwrights Horizons production this
year, following Adam Bock's A Life, to deal head-on with the subject of death but
Ruhl's wry humor keeps ForPeter Pan on her 70th birthday from being
depressing. Instead it's a reminder that the best way to face death may be with a defiant smile.

September 9, 2017

Experience has taught me that I'm a terrible prognosticator.
So many of the shows I get all worked up about at the beginning of a theater
season end up disappointing me. And then shows that I'm kind of ho-hum about
when I first hear or read about them turn out to be some of my all-time faves. Yet,
I can't resist looking ahead and thinking about what's to come this fall. And this
year, the thing that pleases me the most (and that will continue to do so
regardless of what I eventually think about the shows) is the presence of
female directors at the helm of some of the most anticipated productions of this fall season:

M. Butterfly directed by JULIE TAYMOR. Playwright David Henry Hwang explored cultural and
gender stereotypes in this mash-up of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" and the
real-life story of a French diplomat who fell for a Chinese opera star who
seduced him into betraying his country before he discovered that his lover was
actually a man masquerading as a woman. The original 1988 production won both a
Pulitzer Prize and a Best Play Tony and ran for over two years. Now Taymor,
herself a Tony winner for The Lion King, now in its 20th year, is directing M.
Butterfly's first Broadway revival. That's exciting enough but the production
will also mark Taymor's first return to Broadway since she was infamously fired
from Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.M. Butterfly's themes seem more up Taymor's alley and like most avid theatergoers, I'm eager to see how she
will use the music, dance, puppets and Asian theater techniques she loves to make
it her own. The play, which will star Clive Owen and Jin Ha as the mismatched
lovers, is scheduled to open at the Cort Theatre Oct. 26.

The Parisian Womandirected byPAM MACKINNON. Set in contemporary
Washington, this new comedy of manners centers around a woman who tries to get
her lover to help her husband get a high-level position in the government. Beau
Willimon, the creator of the Netflix series "House of Cards," specializes
in political satire and he based his play on the similarly-named 19th century political drama
by the French playwright Henry François Becque. MacKinnon, who won a Tony for
directing the 2013 revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, knows how to
wrangle strong female characters and the strong actors who play them. This time
out she'll be working with Uma Thurman, who has played lots of tough women in
movies but will be making her Broadway debut. The supporting cast includes Blair
Brown, Phillipa Soo and Josh Lucas. The show is set to make its world premiere at the Hudson
Theatre on Nov. 30.

SpongeBob SquarePants directed by TINA LANDAU. I've got to be honest and say that I have my doubts
about this one but the word-of-mouth has been surprisingly good for this musical
version of the animated TV show about the titular sea creature and
his oddball friends who live in an underwater town called Bikini
Bottom. The musical also features an oddball score of original songs by a
boatload of major contemporary songwriters including Susan Bareilles, John
Legend, Cyndi Lauper, Lady Antebellum and David Bowie. Just
the fact that they all wanted to be involved in this project makes me want to see it.
But the show's ultimate success will rest on the shoulders of Landau, who is not
only directing SpongeBob but conceived the musical and has nurtured what's
being touted as a paean to tolerance and acceptance of others through a tryout
in Chicago last year and soon onto the stage at the legendary Palace Theatre,
where the good-natured parazoan and his pals arescheduled to open on Dec. 4

Time and the Conways directed by REBECCA TAICHMAN.Fresh off her Tony win for the luminous Indecent, which marked
her Broadway debut, Taichman is now leading a revival of J. B. Priestley's 1937 drama
about the changing fortunes of an upper-class British family. The play is part
family saga, part allegory about Britain between the World Wars and a
meditation on the metaphysics of time. The versatile Taichman directed a
well-received production of the play at the Old Globe in San Diego last year.
In this Roundabout Theatre production, the family matriarch will be played by
Elizabeth McGovern, returning to the Broadway stage for the first time in 25
years but already conditioned for the part by her turn as the mistress of the
house for six seasons on "Downton Abbey." McGovern, along with a
nine-member supporting cast that includes the always-watchable Gabriel Ebert
and Stephen Boyer, will open The Conways at the American Airlines Theatre on Oct. 10.

September 2, 2017

Monday is Labor Day, which
for some folks means that the summer is winding down, for others that the
school year is starting up and for us theater lovers that a new season is just
around the corner.

And here at Broadway & Me, it also means that it’s time
for my annual tribute to some of the people whose labor makes the theater work.
Over the years, I’ve cheered actors and playwrights, composers and casting
agents. Last year I celebrated the seamstresses, wigmakers, set builders, pit
musicians and all the others who fill the ranks of what some call “Blue Collar
Broadway” (click here to read that). But I want to put the spotlight on a very
different unsung group this year: high school drama teachers.

The job isn’t glamorous but it’s
an invaluable part of the theater ecosystem. Just about everyone you see on a stage remembers some teacher who spotted his or her talent and nurtured it. Of
course, not everyone in the senior class play is destined for—or even
wants—a career on the Great White Way. But the empathy theater educators teach,
the collaborative spirit they encourage and the respect for the power of art
they champion are valuable for everyone, particularly in these coarse times.

And recently, those
first-line scouts have been getting more and more of the recognition they
deserve. Three years ago, Carnegie Mellon University, The Broadway League and the
American Theatre Wing (on whose advisory board I’m proud to sit) joined forces
to create the Excellence in Theatre Education Award which honors K-12 theater
teachers.

The apple-shaped statuette also comes with a $10,000 check for the winning
teacher’s program, an all-expenses paid trip to the Tony Awards ceremony and a
shout-out on the show. This year’s honoree was Rachel Harry, who for 30 years has taught at Hood River Valley High
School in Oregon. Her productions have ranged from such school stalwarts
as The Tempest and Our Town toDoes My
Head Look Big in This, a contemporary piece about a Muslim girl who decides to wear a hijab while attending a U.S. high school (click here to read more about Harry).

And Harry's not the only out
there doing good work. In 2015, journalist Michael Sokolove published “Drama
High,” about Lou Volpe, who has devoted four decades to the drama program at Harry
S. Truman High School in Levittown, Pennsylvania. The town has fallen on hard times as factory jobs have disappeared and resources are low but Volpe has lead his
students to repeated wins at the International Thespian Festival where the best
high school productions from around the country compete each year (click here for more about the book).

Indeed, Volpe, who had no formal theater training
before he began directing school shows, has been so successful at it that Music
Theatre International, the agency that licenses rights to shows from The Music
Man to Avenue Q, commissioned him to adapt Rent (a show that deals with AIDS,
drug use and same-sex relationships) and Spring Awakening (a show that includes
incest, abortion and suicide) so that they might be made more suitable for school
audiences but without losing their distinctive style or diluting their powerful
messages.

But the best testament to the
work that Volpe and his fellow practitioners do may be the fact that NBC has
given the green light to “Rise,” a new hour-long show about a high-school drama
teacher that’s inspired by Volpe’s life. Scheduled for a midseason premiere
next winter, its prospects are promising because “Rise” is co-produced by the guy who did the terrific high school
football drama “Friday Night Lights” and by Broadway producer Jeffrey Seller,
whose credits include Rent, Avenue Q and Hamilton.

The actor Josh Radnor will play Volpe. Sort of. The real Volpe came out years ago but, according to the
press notes, although the TV version has the same name, he now also has a wife and three kids. That’s too bad. But hopefully what will
remain is the underlying message that high school drama teachers can make a difference in
the lives of their students, schools and communities. And that’s something to
celebrate this Labor Day and throughout the year.